There has been a great deal of previous efforts in examining specific protocol utility metric, such as overhead introduced by protocol headers. For instance, in Web based applications, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) headers in these applications are considered overhead. Compression techniques, among other methods, have been applied to HTTP protocol headers to lower the overall protocol overhead and, hence, to increase the overall efficiency of the HTTP protocol. Protocol overhead, therefore, can be used to compute the specific protocol utility metric of a particular protocol based on the fraction of transferred data actually used. However, previous efforts in specific protocol utility metric for Internet based applications focus only on a particular protocol supporting these Web based applications. In reality, a Web based application typically involves multiple protocols to deliver the functionality of the application and there are many application-level client server or peer-to-peer interactions. Increasing the efficiency of a specific protocol, such as protocol header overhead, in an application may indeed increase the efficiency of an application; however, it does not greatly improve or accurately capture the overall efficiency of an application at the application-level.
Therefore, a need exists for a method for providing an application-level utility metric in Internet based applications.